Nvidia's Manju Hegde defects to AMD

One of Nvidia's key executives has left the company and gotten a choice position with its chief competitor. AMD announced this morning that Manju Hegde, formerly VP of CUDA Technical Marketing at Nvidia, has become Corporate VP of the Fusion Experience Program at AMD.

Hegde isn't just any executive—before his stint at Nvidia, he co-founded and served as CEO of Ageia Technologies. Ageia adapted the PhysX programming interface after buying the technology from middleware firm Novodex, and it created the first gaming physics accelerator cards. Nvidia acquired Ageia in 2008 and was quick to add PhysX support to its GeForce graphics cards.

At AMD, Hegde will lead the Fusion Experience Program, which AMD defines as "an initiative focused on identifying innovative computing solutions and applications poised to take full advantage of the forthcoming AMD Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units (APU)." The first APU, Llano, began sampling in April and is scheduled to hit volume production later this year. Llano will have four Phenom II-derived CPU cores and a Radeon graphics processor, all on the same piece of silicon.